Field
Subject matter disclosed herein relates to accessing memory devices.
Information
Solid State Drives (SSDs) offer many advantages over Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). SSDs provide faster execution, lower power consumption, and are not susceptible to mechanical failures, such as head crashes. Because SSDs are typically based on NAND flash devices, there is a practical limit to how much impact channel design has on latency—specifically, splitting a sector across multiple NAND devices results in performance degradation. Contrastingly, other non-volatile devices such as phase change memory (PCM) allow further optimizations at the channel level which can reduce latency. Regardless of the specific memory technology used, such drives may be tailored, at a manufacturing or original equipment manufacturer's facility, to reduce latency as much as possible, often at the expense of the drive's throughput. Unfortunately, a drive's use may vary over time, and low latency operations (a database table update, for example) may give way to operations that would benefit most from high throughput (the transfer of large files for streaming video, for example). Similarly, high throughput operations may give way to operations that would benefit most from low latency.